Sims Learning Connections

Lately I’m finding myself thinking frequently, if not deeply, about emergence. Two recent triggers for this ongoing reflection were:

• Without much thought, labeling one of my what 2.0 memes to me top-level categories this (with bullets under the heading being closer to things that help fuel emergence, contrast to examples of emergence),
• the number of mentions of emergence in AIIM’s Market IQ enterprise 2.0 report (31 per Adobe Search) and feeling that the examples given were fine, but somehow not the entire story.

So, once again I start an exploration with a brainstorm list, this time for the question “In the context of enterprise 2.0, what items potentially demonstrate emergent behavior?”…

1. Use cases for new collaboration and social software applications. I think back to my experience with wiki four+ years ago prior to having benefit of the seeds in wikipatterns.com. Then, we openly didn’t know what we were going to use the wiki for, but overtime, some “standard” use cases emerged. Now I see the same with some of the newer social software applications like Twitter, where not only use cases but syntax conventions (for @username and #hashtags) emerge.
2. Shifts in company culture, including towards more openness and more innovation
3. Shifts in the macro way that employees work
4. Organizational networks, including new ties facilitated by social software applications, shifting demographics, and changing culture
5. Folksonomy, emerging from content categories
6. Increased visibility to the most valuable content, derived both from explicit ratings and from behavior (e.g. tagging, subscriptions, linking, and page views)
7. Wiki page structures
8. Definitions and terminology, including definitions of web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, and knowledge management beyond the original coinage — see for example the enterprise 2.0 definition exchange documented in the AIIM report
9. Collective intelligence. I’m still sorting out in my own mind to what extent this term works for me, but I at least think it is better than AIIM’s “collective wisdom” — although the report also uses “collective intelligence”
10. Perhaps software applications, or at least mash-ups. Is it valid to claim emergence here? Although in a common-language sense they are emerging, it really isn’t emergence in the sense of complexity theory.

What did I miss? What are additional emergence examples that apply to enterprise 2.0?

Further Reading:

• Jim McGee’s The problem of emergence (published at FASTForward blog, October 2007), where he writes:
  

  The attraction of emergence is twofold. One is the realization that conventionally structured approaches have generally failed when tackling knowledge intensive problems. Knowledge work and knowledge workers don’t mesh well with the structuring techniques appropriate to industrial work. The second [attraction] is the perceived success of emergent approaches behind current Web 2.0 success stories on the Internet.

• Jordan Frank’s Pros and Cons of Emergence (also October 2007)
• Andrew McAfee’s Explaining my Fondness for Explicit Content (March 2008) that includes a nice discussion of implicit (derived) information per #6 in the above list
• Mike Gotta’s Enterprise 2.0: Culture Required? (April 2008)
• Kevin Kelly’s fascinating and well illustrated The Bottom is Not Enough (February 2008), where he writes:
  

  I have tried to temper my celebration of the bottom with my belief that the bottom is not enough for what we really want. To get to the best we need some top down intelligence, too. I have always claimed that nuanced view. And now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.

  and

  What’s new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much “hive” in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations.

• Wikipedia’s Emergence page
• del.icio.us emergence tag

Lots more yet for me to explore on this topic. Please leave a comment with your recommended resources.
Photo credit: Ann-Kathrin Rehse