Genii Software and the session slides
This year at Lotusphere, I had the privilege of attending the Blogger Q&A session with Mike Rhodin (General Manager of Lotus) and Alistair Rennie (VP, Development and Technical Support of Lotus.) This session is really spectacular as we get some direct interaction with the top echelon of Lotus, and they're not afraid to answer what are often pretty aggressive questions.
There were some excellent write-ups of this year's session by Ross Mayfield and Bill Buchan, And if you look at Ross' post, you'll see this from me...
Bright yellow hair: last year was wisdom of crowds, this year it is emergence, how do you see lotus leveraging the social aspect that surrounds you?
Remember when we had Connections up last year and took it down after the conference? Our business partner community went non-linear, but had some concerns. 24 people from Redmond here. But we put it back up. Encourage everyone to join the Greenhouse.
To elaborate, Mr. Rhodin said "I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on (how to leverage our community)" (Before you ask, yes, everyone in the room laughed.) And as Mike and Alistair continued on to the discussion of documentation Wikis and devWorks, I brought up concerns that these would contain only IBM-generated content. Both men were emphatic that this would not be the case, and they needed to straighten out anyone who thought this. IBM would welcome community contributions, they insisted, and they were necessary to maximize customer value.
So I'm thinking that it's merely a case of miscommunication when someone else at Lotus sends Ben Langhinrichs a take-down request for the links to the Lotusphere 2008 session slides in his fantastic annual session database. This has to be accidental, right? The General Manager of Lotus said that IBM wants community contributions to improve documentation resources for customers. How else do you interpret what Ben provides? He's not even providing the slides -- merely pointers on where to go and find them. That's documentation. Community contributed documentation. And it's exactly the kind of thing that IBM can choose to encourage or to smother.
Mr. Rhodin, you said you wanted to hear my thoughts. My thought is: this is the fast-track to alienating your most loyal customer base. This is exactly, 100% the reason I asked that question. And the reason I was happy with your answer was because your enthusiasm suggested that you would not permit this kind of thing to happen again. That you did not want to allow IBM to turn back into the anti-social isolating priesthood of knowledge that predated the web. IBM is a smarter, faster, more responsive organization now, and Lotus is at the forefront of that transformation.
Did I misunderstand you? I hope not.
I can't imagine the effort it takes to keep an organization of independent thinkers the size of Lotus Software on the same page. But I imagine that one important piece is identifying when someone is still back 10 chapters. I think this is just such a case. I hope they can get straightened out.
Thank you.
UPDATE: Do I need to do a mea culpa? I'm not sure.
Comments
Posted by Ben Langhinrichs At 06:16:48 PM On 01/30/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Timothy Briley At 12:32:48 AM On 01/31/2008 | - Website - |
According to Ben:
"Volker was just being clever, realizing that there was no security set on the HTML directory where the zip files were stored. He decided to act as if that was intentional, but since there is no link to those files outside of Lotusphere On-Line, it is quite clear this is jut incompetent security rather than intentional sharing. But sometimes, if you act like a thing is so and nobody comes along to argue, it is so. So far, nobody has come along to argue."
Somebody at IBM has noticed but didn't argue. Instead they flipped the security switch and now vowe's links are dead. Time to yell some more.
Posted by Timothy Briley At 01:02:04 PM On 01/31/2008 | - Website - |