Lessons from Thomas Vander Wal: Reputation and Social Comfort
Earlier this month, we hosted a workshop here at Viget led by Thomas Vander Wal centered on Social Design in the Enterprise. I think it went great, and thanks to those who attended as well as to Thomas. A few of us went bowling afterward, and for those who didn't: you missed out.
Thomas led us through a series of challenges and practices that try to help the necessary challenge of pushing the needle in an enterprise environment -- while the consumer web may be satisfied with a 1-9-90 model and widespread participation inequality, the enterprise web requires a much higher level of participation. Thomas was a tour de force when it came to knowledge-dropping; I don't think I'm unlike other workshop attendees when I say that I spent the weekend sparking new ideas as some of the concepts Thomas talked about sunk in.
The thing is, while some of these concepts are crucial to enterprise products, most of the concepts are still very relevant to the consumer space as well. I just want to take a second and look at two things that I found interesting during and after the workshop.
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Workshop: Social Design for the Enterprise
If you're in the DC area (or even if you're not), it's worth checking out the workshop we'll be hosting next week with the renowned Thomas Vander Wal as he teaches attendees how to design and execute social products in larger organizations. Here's the description:
It's tempting to follow the lead of mainstream social networks and applications when you bring social principles to your organization, but it seldom works out as planned. Firewalls, organizational structures, training, and interaction with direct customers are all too common hinderances.
This workshop, led by InfoCloud's Thomas Vander Wal, focuses on building, deploying, and using social tools inside (and outside) organizations based on deep understanding of the foundations of social tools and how people interact with each other using them. We'll work through tools (features and functionality), user experience (ease of use), sociality (how people interact with each other), and encouraging use.
While the design and human interaction problems involved are often overlooked and not well understood, this workshop will provide models and frameworks that can help you think through these problems and find success for your organizations and clients.
We're keeping the workshop fairly small, but we've still got a few tickets left. Check out the workshop's page here. We hope to see you there!