Implementation 2.0

The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes, Stephen Colbert, the Manchester Guardian, Learning Circuits, and other leading voices can’t stop talking about Web 2.0. You’ve read the stories; the web is now the read/write web. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of 9.1 million articles in 253 languages, written entirely by volunteers. Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr are growing faster than the web in its meteoric growth phase. There are 70 million logs online, and 120,000 new logs are created every day (that’s about 1.4 new blogs per second). These phenomena are global; only 35 percent of all blogs are in English.

This is all well and good, but it provides no guidance to the manager who wants to take advantage of the new technologies. Managers need to know the opportunities and the pitfalls, applications and benefits, tricks of the trade and lessons of experience.

Indeed, the web is chock full of explanations of blogs, tags, and other social software. I interviewed scores of people to capture their thoughts on the human side of implementing and sustaining collaborative networks. As you would expect, people have different notions of what works. I’ve tried to capture these multiple perspectives in the checklists and vignettes that follow.

Remainder of the article at Learning Circuits.