Google have gone an awfully long way to changing how we view geographic information.  Google Maps and Google Earth have allowed us to digitally explore our world like never before.  A new site wants to take things one step further however.

Collaborate.org launched this week at the Future in Review conference.  It’s aim is to bring geospatial data to the masses via over 2 million different data layers that can be overlaid on top of maps.

“We want to harness the collective knowledge of the online global community, sharing expertise and enthusiasm,” said company CEO Kevin Montgomery. “We are providing worldwide geospatial infrastructure to empower people.”

The site is built upon World Wind, an open source platform developed by NASA.  It’s kinda like Google Earth but on an open source platform that allows users to develop and interact with it.

“It’s an interface for that spatial data and puts it in the native context of the real world. It’s a way to allow innovation to occur.” said Patrick Hogan, the apps project developer at NASA.

The range of possible applications are limitless.  For instance, they believe they can provide real-time geomapping of all tweets made in the world or provide mapping of all flights as they zip around the world.

The more people contribute to the environment, the richer the data available to users.

“Technologically, it’s big data leveraging the cloud with community crowdsourcing moderating the data,” Montgomery said.

Suffice to say it is early days, but this looks like a project that is very much worth keeping an eye on.  You can find out more about it in the video below.

Noted Nazi propogandaist Joseph Goebbels famously said that if you repeat a lie often enough, sooner or later people will come to regard it as the truth.  Whilst obviously not on the scale of some of the things Goebbels trotted out, the idea that to achieve expertise in something has become pretty much accepted since Malcom Gladwell popularised the notion in Outliers.  As heuristics go, it’s one of the most widely used.

Is it correct though?  Some new research suggests not.  The study looked at the affect of practice on the skill level of chess players and musicians, and found that practice alone was not enough to explain the differences in performance amongst people.

“Practice is indeed important to reach an elite level of performance, but this paper makes an overwhelming case that it isn’t enough,” researcher Professor Zach Hambrick says.

It runs counter to the Gladwell heuristic of 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery of a subject.  Hambrick goes on

“The evidence is quite clear that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice,” he says.

To reach their conclusion Hambrick and colleagues analysed 14 studies of chess players and musicians.  They were looking in particular for the impact practice had on performance.  They found that at most it accounted for perhaps 1/3 of the differences in skill level of chess players and musicians.  The remainder can be explained by things such as natural ability, intelligence, the age in which we begin practising and so on.

Hambrick is at pains to point out that things aren’t all doom and gloom however.  He suggests that rather than showing how many of us will never achieve greatness regardless of how often we practice, it does instead make clear the likelihood of achieving certain things, and thus give us a more realistic picture, thus allowing us to refocus efforts in more fertile areas.

In Charles Dickens classic Oliver Twist, the character Mr Bumble is informed that “the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction”.  It solicits the classic response

“If the law supposes that … the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.”

Never has this seemed more apt than in a ruling this week in New York City that the sofa surfing website Airbnb is in fact illegal.  The judge ruled that a man who rented out his flat via the site had violated a 2011 law that was setup to prevent illegal hotels.  This ruling determines that property owners cannot rent out their property for less than a 30-day period over the course of a year, so the odd weekend here and there as is common on Airbnb is against the law.

The case in question revolved around a gentleman who had rented his appartment to a woman for a 3-day stint in September.  This was deemed to have broken the hotel law, and the judge ordered him to pay a $7,000 fine.  Whilst a later ruling reduced this to $2,400, it still represents a major blow to the ethos of the site.

Here is the official statement from Airbnb.

“This decision runs contrary to the stated intention and the plain text of New York law, so obviously we are disappointed. But more importantly, this decision makes it even more critical that New York law be clarified to make sure regular New Yorkers can occasionally rent out their own homes. There is universal agreement that occasional hosts like Nigel Warren were not the target of the 2010 law, but that agreement provides little comfort to the handful of people, like Nigel, who find themselves targeted by overzealous enforcement officials. It is time to fix this law and protect hosts who occasionally rent out their own homes. Eighty-seven percent of Airbnb hosts in New York list just a home they live in — they are average New Yorkers trying to make ends meet, not illegal hotels that should be subject to the 2010 law.”

It’s worth remembering that this is the same Airbnb that was used as a platform to provide temporary shelter to over 4,000 people after hurricane Sandy had hit the very same state that has now ruled much of the sites activities illegal.  There’s gratitude for you.

As Mr Bumble aptly put it, the law is indeed an ass.

Earlier this month I wrote about a new service called Bonus.ly.  The idea behind the site is quite simple.  Each month employees are allocated a budget, be it financial or otherwise, that they can then allocate to their colleagues according to who they feel has performed well.  The idea is that peers will be much better placed to know who the top performers are than managers, and this peer recognition is better motivation.

The site is currently in testing so there isn’t a huge amount of empirical data to go on, but a new research paper suggests that they may be on to something.

The researchers wanted to test the performance claims of the kind of prosocial bonuses used by Bonus.ly.  To test things, they applied prosocial bonuses to a team of sales people in a pharmaceutical company.  They calculated that when a $10 bonus was given to a salesman to spend on himself, he only generated $3 in extra sales, so a $7 loss.  When the salesman was given a $10 bonus to give to a colleague however, the prosocial bonus yielded an extra $52 in increased sales.  Which is kinda interesting.

The authors of the research have a new book out in a few weeks where they chronicle the kind of social dynamics and psychological research behind selfless behaviour, and the benefits that can acrue from it.  It’s called Happy Money and could be well worth adding to your reading list.

They are however at pains to point out that taking an individuals entire bonus and making them spend it on other people may not be entirely a good idea as a motivational tool, even if of course if that employee does well they’re likely to get plenty back in return.  The feeling that money is being taken from you does kinda act as a demotivator.
It’s certainly an interesting use of money as a motivator however and if nothing else will provide some fascinating insights as these various approaches generate material and evidence as to their effectiveness.

Social business has massive potential to change how your organisation operates.  As with many social based work however, the failure rate remains unduly high.  IBM have released a new report that aims to change that by sharing some of the things that the best organisations do.

The document is concise at only 12 pages, but provides a nice introduction to social business.  It says how many organisations are using social tools and philosophies to improve their customer service, product development and HR functions, not to mention of course the more traditional sales and marketing.

Where the report comes into its own however is in explaining how these improvements have been made.  IBM introduce the concept of social business patterns.  These are akin to business process flows, and IBM discovered several key patterns in successful organisations.

• Finding expertise
• Gaining external customer insights
• Increasining knowledge sharing
• Improving recruiting and on-boarding
• Managing mergers and acquisitions
• Enabling and improving workplace sanity

Lets look at each in turn.

Finding expertise

Old school knowledge management has been a core component of its modern incarnation of social business.  With KM being a mature field, the report has a good back catalogue of issues that need to be overcome, but also some good strategies for overcoming them if you want to achieve the outcomes IBM believe are possible in this area.

• quickly locate the right people, or published content containing, the expertise needed to solve a problem
• connect the best possible resources to effectively respond to customer needs
• document and share reusable solutions to common issues
• create highly-engaged and productive employees

Gaining external customer insights

To many organisations persist in being ‘make and sell’ types, where little customer feedback is sought.  For them, social media is merely another tool by which to flog their wares.  Social business tools allow you not only to listen to what customers are openly saying about you online however, but also to invite them into your own communities to share their feelings.

• quickly learn customers’ opinions and preferences related to existing and potential products and services
• identify and connect with key customer influencers to aid marketing efforts

Increasing knowledge sharing

This pattern is very similar to pattern #1 in that both very much fall under the knowledge management umbrella.  Whilst IBM do state some benefits from this, such as fewer meetings and higher employee engagement, it would have been nice had they shared some more tangible successes from knowledge sharing, such as whether it helped produce more new products or better processes.

• more efficiently and effectively capture, share and access knowledge
• increase innovation through wider reach of ideas
• reduce excessive, unproductive time spent searching and exchanging information

Improving recruiting and on-boarding

Getting the best talent into your organisation is as much of a no brainer as ensuring that talent is then utilised effectively.  Sadly of course, a great many companies screw up their recruitment, and as with dating, the first weeks are crucial.  Research earlier this year revealed that organisations with low employee turnover scored around 4x as much profit as those with high turnover.

• collaboratively find and connect the right candidate to the right position
• streamline assessment and hiring processes
• better connect, engage and retain new hires
• contextually recommend expertise to increase new hires’ productivity

Managing mergers and acquisitions

This is another knowledge management pattern in that you’re both looking to improve the transfer of experiences learned from past mergers to current staff, whilst also helping to better communicate the shared values and cultures expected of the newly merged group.  With the track record of successful mergers being pretty poor, this is clearly an area that is very difficult to concquer.

• increase overall success rate of merger and acquisition activities
• raise effectiveness of vision setting and communication before, during and after merger or acquisition
• accelerate creation of “one company” community and culture

Enabling and improving workplace safety

An interesting final area the report explores is in improving health and safety.  It’s an area that isn’t often covered or trumpeted as a social business success.  Nevertheless, IBM believe that social tools can help spread both the explicit and tacit understanding of health and safety procedures and behaviours.

• speed communication of new or changed safety regulations, policies and procedures
• minimize or eliminate project execution delays arising from actual or potential safety issues
• improve innovation in safety procedures by increasing dialog between safety experts and workers

As mentioned at the start, it is only a short report, with content amounting to 10 pages at most.  As such the limitations are plain.  It won’t be something that provides all the answers to your social business questions, nor indeed does it cover all of the things that social business can achieve.  It is a very IBM-centric publication, in that it focuses very much on the things IBM can help you with.  There is no mention for instance of crowdfunding or strategy formulation and dissemination.  If you’re new to the field though it provides a good introduction to the kind of things social business can do, whilst also providing some potential metrics to measure success.