Introduction to Smart Community

The concept of community is based on collaboration where social collaboration, its tool and technologies (e.g. Web 2.0) can play a very significant role to create, spread, maintain and reuse knowledge which in turn can generate significant revenues in business. Before diving into details of social collaboration and its impact on communities, let us explore what is a smart community.

A community is an interconnected group of people with similar areas of interest. They connect either physically or virtually, share their ideas on a topic/area of interests and generate knowledge artifacts which are reusable in similar context. Smart communities can be conceptualized as a vibrant, up to date knowledge hub on a particular area of interest relevant for business. A smart community built around technology and business is all about building an ecosystem of people who are interconnected and contributing towards a common community vision, creation of knowledge, exchange of ideas and experiences through proper out reach to a wider network of people of similar mindset or interest. The following can be thought of some basic characteristics of a smart community within an organization:

• Find and stay connected with the right practitioners, with the right skills
• Identify appropriate peer groups and rapid collaboration
• Build skills, mentoring and share knowledge through virtual collaboration
• Reduce efforts significantly by obtaining the correct information
• Cross hierarchy or organizational structures independently

All the various aspects and collaboration types that make a community smart cannot be realized without social collaboration. Social collaboration, its tool and technologies have opened up a multi-fold channel of idea exchanges, knowledge creation, classification, and searching.

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Benefit of a Smart Community

A smart community can be thought of as an engine for the creation and spreading of tactical knowledge which is more relevant for a particular context and targeted for a particular set of people with a specific need; which cannot be created easily. The knowledge that is shared and learned in communities can be thought of as a social capital. People connect at various levels and across departments, without the constraints of a formal structure. As people connect with each other they are able to share their expertise and learn from others. Significant time savings can happen by assisting co-workers who have faced similar problems or are having similar experiences. It reduces the learning curve as well as errors. Previously, it was critical to know co-workers with similar experiences especially in large and geographically distributed organizations. However, with social collaboration and Web 2.0, we now have a platform to identify these similar set of people rapidly and thus creation, maintenance and sharing of knowledge with other practitioners is in real-time. The following list are a few benefits of having a smart community leveraging the latest social collaboration tools and technologies:

• Rapid problem solving
• Leverage existing knowledge to rapidly develop new capabilities
• Leveraging best practices quickly
• Standardizing practices
• Time savings in communication and collaboration
• Chances to avoid mistakes

Now let's have a brief description of social collaboration, its impact in the organization and offerings from IBM.

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Social Collaboration and Organization

Can we ever imagine surviving without having to interact with our colleagues, friends and family? Every second of our lives we send and receive information. We can never reach the pinnacle of excellence without collaboration just as an individual.

The Information Technology industry has now become one of the most critical support industries serving almost all the domains in the world, be it healthcare, research or financial. The IT workforce is responsible for systems architecture, testing, maintenance, application development, operational procedures and a gamut of innumerable other activities. The need for teaming and social collaboration is in direct need in such an industry where individuals can not function alone. If we analyze the daily working hours of a software professional, almost 40% of their time is spent searching for information and collaborating (meetings, forums, chat, and brainstorming being some of the few activities).

The majority of software projects are composed of a team and often beyond the boundary of location, country, race, and language, where the concept of virtual and distributed teams is very much desired. A team usually consists of people from all around the globe, from different time zones, different cultures and different work habits. There may be projects in which people work on for years with each other without physically meeting even once. So collaboration becomes all the more important for the success of the project. Not only for software projects - any initiative comprising of distributed teams require the power of social collaboration.

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Web 2.0 and Social Collaboration

The term "Web 2.0" was coined by Tim O' Reilly according to whom "Web 2.0 is a term that captures the widespread sense that there's something qualitatively different about today's Web." Web 2.0 is not about doing new things; it is about doing the same things differently keeping the foremost goal of "Connecting people to people effortlessly and seamlessly". Web 2.0 tries to group all existing open standards under one umbrella; achieving reuse, providing tools for social collaboration, harnessing people computing and making the web itself a platform for development.

The key distinguishing factor for Web 2.0 which also is its survival mantra is the human aspect. The main purpose of Web 2.0 as outlined above is to connect people in numerous new ways and harnessing the collective intelligence. In this regard, many new concepts have been created such as: Techniques (Blogging, Social Networking, Communities, Mashups, and Tagging), Standards (XHTML, CSS, and REST) and Tools (RSS, AJAX, DOJO, PHP and Ruby). The power of Web 2.0 is the creation of new relationships between collaborators and information. This enhances Social Collaboration to the fullest.

The components of Web 2.0 promote social collaboration to the fullest. Blogging is the art of social conversation and have replaced personal home pages and this helps for a more consolidated flow of thoughts and ideas. Wikis have enabled collaborative contribution and authoring among distributed teams. Tagging or folksonomy is a collaborative means of identifying information widgets to increase the power of any web site. Combined with other such concepts, Web 2.0 provides an ideal platform for social collaboration.

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Components of Web 2.0 and Social Collaboration

Web 2.0 focuses on completing the same tasks in a different manner that fosters collaboration and innovation. The major concepts that have been considered in Web 2.0 are:

• Blogging: This is a website where users can post their issues, clarifications and discussions for various topics and areas. It allows dynamic content addition and modification and provides a real-time post on the web.
• Social Networking: These are dedicated virtual communities where people can collaborate on a social as well on a professional basis. These sites contain advanced tools and features which help the users optimize social collaboration.
• Wikis: A wiki is a collection of pages which focus on a related content. Wikis have a set of users and access control rights. This is a very powerful tool for collaboration and can be very simply created.
• Bookmarking/Tags: Tagging or Folksonomy is a collection of bookmarks which comes about through the effort of providing a set of keywords or tags that refer to useful information. Creating such a set of bookmarks would enable users to efficiently lookup the required information.
• Atom/RSS: Atom and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) are technologies which support the Web 2.0 paradigm by allowing users to subscribe to content instead of visiting websites. This represents a much smarter methodology of how consumers obtain information.
• Podcasting: This is a mechanism to publish media files to the internet so that users can subscribe to the same and helps in cascading useful content across communities.

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IBM Tools for Social Collaboration

IBM has always been a pioneer in social collaboration and has leveraged Web 2.0 and the associated technologies for developing powerful social collaboration tools. IBM also has a rigid social computing guideline which enables users to effectively leverage the power of social collaboration. IBM has developed both internal and external tools for helping in social collaboration. These suite of tools help social collaboration and creation of smart communities both internal and beyond the organization. The following sections aim to outline some of the Social collaboration tools from IBM that can be used to create a smart community.

LotusLive and Smart Community

LotusLive (www.lotuslive.com) is an online collaboration solutioning platform provided by IBM. LotusLive covers some of the building blocks of social computing and Web 2.0 with support for document sharing, online meeting support and online office tools. IBM and customers can leverage this solution for online collaboration reducing customer friction and making way for more transparency.

LotusLive has basically two components: Networking and Collaboration and Web Conferencing. Networking and Collaboration is supported by LotusLive Engage and LotusLive Connections whereas Web Conferencing is supported by LotusLive Meetings and LotusLive Events.

• LotusLive Engage: This is a smarter meeting service solution which integrates the online meeting experience with collaboration tools like file storing and sharing, instant messaging and report creation. Online communities are an integral part of this tool and the startup for the tool is seamless and installation free. This fulfills the need of rapid collaboration among the community members and share required information.
• LotusLive Connections: This is an integrated suite of web collaboration services that provides the following; activity management, online chat services, and file management. This suite works in tandem with LotusLive Engage. The minimum requirements of this suite are a web browser and internet connectivity which boosts the product acceptance further. Activity management helps in better co-ordination and smoother task execution that helps the online communities to synchronize their work accordingly.
• LotusLive Meetings: This is a multi-functional online meeting service integrating web, audio and video conferencing. The interface is highly simplified with minimum plug-ins required. This suite is integrated with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook. In a distributed community, often people are globally located; hence having conversations, either verbally or face to face becomes very difficult. However for any community to perform optimally, it is always the best to have a personal touch which is never achieved until and unless we have a humane-style conversation, which is possible with this tool.
• LotusLive Events: This is an event management service for management of webinars. Online events can be easily organized using this suite. It includes a host of features like automated mailing announcements, registration management, event rehearsal, event archiving, multiple browser and platform support, and exporting registration information for future events. For any community, event management is a key component which helps the members to bond together and this suite provides highly enhanced capabilities for the same.

There is no separate cost involved for procuring separate software and hardware for this suite. It is the first suite of Web-platform collaboration and social networking suite connecting people from different organizations outside organizational boundaries. Information sharing, client-project transparency increases more with this suite. Software as a service (SaaS) is being offered by this suite and hence the infrastructure is not a concern for the stakeholders. The power of social collaboration is greatly enhanced by this suite.

Lotus Connections and Smart Community

Lotus Connections is social computing software which taps into the power of social computing for greater innovation at lesser cost. Concepts of Web 2.0 like wikis, tagging, folksonomy and Blogging are all supported in this suite. There are five main components: Communities, Profiles, Blogs, Dogear and Activities.

• Communities: Creates common areas of collaboration and fosters innovation through a set of people interested in common objectives. Through the suite we can create specific communities for specific business purposes which increase the focus greatly. Though we had the concept of communities earlier also, the tool provides a range of functionalities which streamlines the creation of smarter communities, a simple example being the provision of geographical support for the tool.
• Profiles: Helps users to find other users on a business specific requirement through the organization based on expertise, projects and responsibilities. Contains an integrated directory and location engine and also provides facility for searching into the asset repository for any organization. Social tagging is also supported here. Keeping the profile management helps people to connect in a much smarter way filtering the exact criteria and need.
• Blogs: Blogs have been one of the breakthroughs of Web 2.0 where in users can give their viewpoints on the same space and perform collaborative thinking. This increases transparency, collateral thinking and fosters an area of innovation. One of the features that a smart community must have is trust among the team members and this is encouraged through the mechanism of Blogging.
• Dogear: This is a suite to create, organize and share bookmarks with other users, as well as management of the bookmarks. This helps to easily identify where information can be obtained for a particular topic thus reusing the research that have been done by other users. One of the main pain points that communities had was the time and effort spent in finding the right information. Bookmarking/Tagging of useful information helps community members to find the right balance of information very efficiently hence encouraging the transition to smart communities.
• Activities: This helps users for activity management and provides a centralized console for planning collaborative activities. Other users can seamlessly integrate into the activity management done by a particular user. Automated notifications are also a part of this package, among others. As communities are gradually getting global, it helps members to have an idea of the other person's activity chart in order to schedule work and get it done more efficiently. This enhances the efficiency of working for a smart community.

When an organization is inter-connected using Lotus Connections, we have optimal work execution with major reuse of existing work items. Closer relationship and collaboration is established when we use such suite of tools even with distributed teams. Work is done in a much more innovative and collaborative environment and would definitely be the source of greater innovation.

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Value creation by Smart Community through Social Collaboration

By analyzing one of the largest organizational electronic communication networks ever collected and combining it with detailed performance data, researchers have shown initial evidences that social capital generated from social networks and communities are positively correlated with information worker's productivity. By constructing social networks at both the individual and project levels, it was observed that performance in the individual in social network is higher than those are isolated from social network.

The networked behavior of its employees creates insights about teamwork, innovation, and the transmission of knowledge and ideas within the company. This is especially important for global companies where experts in one geography might be unaware that colleagues in other geography are struggling with a similar problem and in this scenario social collaboration brings them closer.

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Social Collaboration and Smart communities beyond Organization

The nature of social collaboration changes greatly when it occurs outside organizational boundaries. The communities that are developed within an organization are usually concentrated on business profiles and technical fulfillment. Rarely do we come across communities within an organization which strives towards fulfilling personal topics of interest for the employees. While this is dictated from professional and business needs, there are various avenues that are missed out when we consider only organizational boundaries. As soon as we come out of the organizational domain, it opens a world of possibilities because the rules and domains are no longer as rigid. This not only fosters greater innovation but more creativity. The point that hampers this is the fact that though rules may be detrimental towards innovation, it introduces a discipline which becomes absent in the outside world.

Statistics say 2/3 of Teens use Social Networking sites at least monthly, 1/5 of teens use social networks daily and 1/3 of Adults use at least monthly [Source: North American Technographics Retail and Marketing Online Youth Survey, Q4 2007 North American Social Technographics Online Survey, Q2, 2007 7 Entire contents Copyright 2008 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved]. Until recently, these communities of people interact for their personal need, but we are yet to explore power of social collaboration and build a smart community for society.

Communities outside organizational boundaries operate on similar lines to organizational contained boundaries. The things that increase greatly are personalization, customization and domains that cut across cultural, social and regional boundaries. The members of the community are much freer in their views and ideas leading to a much wider domain. A percentage of these communities are focused on community based development that goes towards society fulfillment which eventually is contributing a smarter and better planet. Collaboration through such communities outside boundaries impacts the ecosystem of the society greatly. Due to evolution of the Internet, creation and meaningful existence of these communities have become much simplified.

Think of a smart community of doctors in a specialized area who can be reached on demand, think of a smart community of researchers dedicated on a particular topic. They can reach out and find similar set of people with similar kinds of interests using social collaboration and can create value/knowledge out that. Social collaboration, if adopted and implemented correctly can bring greater value to society and mankind. So in each area of our live where we are dependent on others services and help, that thing we can make much better by means of social collaboration. Following section describes briefly few of the most popular social collaboration tools where people meet together and form a group or communities. We can surely think of a tomorrow where these communities will bring enough value to the society and technology through collaboration, participate in collaborative development and generate value that can cross the boundary of organizations.

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External Social collaboration tools

There are numerous social collaboration tools available on the World Wide Web which has a variety of features and facilities starting from common networking between people to highly useful community forums. Though the number is very high, we would be focusing on the most popular and try to have an idea as to the features of each. These features would then give us an idea as to the contribution of these towards creating the smart community.

• Facebook: Facebook was formulated by Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Apart from the normal features like chat services, profile management and status management; it has numerous other unique features. Every user has a wall where they can post their messages more on the lines of the blog format. It has an ability to import from popular blog sites as well. Gift management is one very useful feature of Facebook where users can send gifts which give the personalization aspect. Ad-posting is another feature where users can post free classified advertisements. There are various networks and groups that are present for users to join in Facebook ranging in their topics. Users can also post videos on Facebook and this can serve as a great tool for learning as well.
• Orkut: Orkut was created by Orkut Buyukkokten and is owned by Google. It has the common features of message posting, communities and live chat facility. Album creation and video upload from You Tube are available. Poll features are also present. Orkut also has high security features which enable only authenticated users and groups to access personal information.
• MySpace: MySpace was founded in 2003 and is owned by Fox Interactive Media. It has standard profile management features, blogs and high level multimedia support. Messaging support is present along with a bulletin board feature. Instant messaging is supported along with a highly advanced feature for music where users can upload their discography. MySpace has an advanced API whereby users can customize the site according to their requirements. MySpace also has mobile accessibility and has support for RSS feeds. Polling, forums and ad-posting are other features supported by MySpace.
• LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a business specific social networking site and is unique from others in the fact that it focuses more on the corporate segment of the social network population. This is much more industry and organization based and people build contacts with those they know in business. It is highly secure because membership is based upon professional references of existing users. Apart from this it has all the regular features of any normal social networking site.

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Benefits

Social collaboration has always been practiced in some inherent form. However what we have today are enterprises creating an environment for social collaboration and developing excellent resources in order to tap into the incredible power of social collaboration using social computing. The concepts of reuse and innovation are driven very much in this model owing to the massive strength of the connected group.

As the market for technology becomes more and more competitive with new products and services available each day, people have become an important focus point in the success of an organization. More connected the resources of an organization are, higher is the social collaboration index and higher is the quality of the "social software" generated. Higher collaboration also leads to cost savings through reuse, more practical realization of the 24X7 work space and brainstorming of globally distinct minds.

A critical benefit of this collaboration is the reduction in the barriers between the client and the project delivery teams. Clients are encouraged to be part of the social collaboration. As soon as they start using the concept, the person on the other end does not only become a developer or a project manager, but also a human being capable of understanding the client's problem. Collaborating on a social level not only gives the client, but also project teams a different perspective on the client's issues and this only results in a much more satisfied client and a better business solution to be reused for other clients.

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Challenges

While we have huge number of positives for implementing social collaboration using social computing, there are many challenges here. Loss of confidentiality and privacy is one of the major hindrances here. Whenever people team over social networks, inadvertently there are risks that information confidential to the organization may come out. If proper controls are not kept in place, there may be huge losses for organizations along with violations of intellectual property.

As most social collaboration tools are not controlled by any central body, there will not be any set rules or structure to such computing. This entails tremendous self-responsibility while performing such activities. Also because of the lack of central control, the implementation becomes slightly unstructured and this may in turn lead to waste of effort instead of increase in productivity. There is also a very small investment in such efforts by small organizations. Adapting to social collaboration on a structured basis is also something that may have a steep learning curve because people would need to also learn the principles while participation in certain activities.

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Future Scope

The power of social collaboration, if utilized properly, can dissolve social and cultural work barriers as well as promote innovation and higher productivity. Social collaboration is here to stay and the faster organizations adapt and support the demand for collaboration, they will have a stronger marketplace position. The need is to implement strong organizational support which would help create a structured approach to performing social collaboration and minimize risks.

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Acknowledgement

We convey our thanks and sincerely acknowledge guidance and ideas from Ram Viswanathan (IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect of GBSC) without whose support it could not be completed.

Resources

Learn

• Lotus Connections Suite
  
  
• Communities of Practice
  
  
• Tacit Knowledge
  
  
• COP Best Practices
  
  
• Papers and Presentation
  
  
• Community Best Practices
  
  
• In the Information on Lotus Live.
  
  
• Browse the Web 2.0 information on Wikipedia
  
  
• Check out developerWorks IBM Web 2.0 Toolkit
  
  

Get products and technologies

• Download IBM product evaluation versions or explore the online trials in the IBM SOA Sandbox and get your hands on application development tools and middleware products from DB2®, Lotus®, Rational®, Tivoli®, and WebSphere®.
  
  

About the authors

Diptiman Dasgupta is an IBM Certified Senior IT Architect in Global Business Solution Center (GBSC), India. He has about 12 years of experience in design and development, architecting, providing technical strategy, solutions for creating and leveraging assets in client solution as well as providing technical leadership to the organization. He also acts as a Core Member of WW SOA and Web services CoP. He is Co-chair of TEC-India and currently leading many organization level initiatives related to thought leadership and technical vitality improvement of IBM as part of DE Action Network (DEAN).

Rudranil Dasgupta is an IBM Associate IT Architect, Advisory Accredited IT Specialist currently working as Project Lead in a project for the Electronics Industry. He has about 6 years of experience in design and development, architecting, providing technical strategy, solutions for creating and leveraging assets in client solution as well as providing technical leadership to the organization. He has in depth experience in working with WebSphere solutions, SOA, Web 2.0, Content Management and Java/J2EE. He has a Master of Computer Applications and a Bachelor of Physics Degree.

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Table of contents

• Introduction to Smart Community
• Benefit of a Smart Community
• Social Collaboration and Organization
• Web 2.0 and Social Collaboration
• Components of Web 2.0 and Social Collaboration
• IBM Tools for Social Collaboration
• Value creation by Smart Community through Social Collaboration
• Social Collaboration and Smart communities beyond Organization
• External Social collaboration tools
• Benefits
• Challenges
• Future Scope
• Acknowledgement
• Resources
• About the authors
• Comments

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