What are we doing with our time?

Nov 17 2011

My mind has been thinking on this topic for a little while now and the first public mention that I made on it was via my little followed twitter account:

RT @ Angry Birds: 30 Million Daily Active Users and 300 Million Minutes of Gameplay Per Day - good for them, sad for society.
October 18, 2011 23:00 via HTC PeepReplyRetweetFavorite
@michaelransley
Michael Ransley

While all congratulations should go to the makers of the game, but not much mention has been made in the press as to what that figure 300 million minutes worth of gameplay actually means globally or more important to our society.  To break it down, this is:

  • 5,000,000 hours – to put this figure into perspective, the average Australian’s life expectancy is 81.7 years (US and UK are slightly lower) or 711,984 hours.  This means that the equivalent of 7 lives every day are spent playing angry birds.
  • If we assume time is money and instead of playing the game we gave money to charity at the rate of $10 per hour we would raise $50,000,000 per day, that’s $18.2 billion per year.  If we use the calculations that were used for Kim Kardashian’s wedding (which reportedly cost $17 million), the annual play time from angry birds could buy:
    • 2 Billion new born child kits.
    • 275 million girl’s educations.
    • 481 million mosquito nets.

Now, you may read this and say ‘So what is your point?’  My point is that today we have access to tools and resources like never before in history and what are we doing with them?  Are we using it to better our community, nation or world – or are using these tools to…. well… waste time?

If we instead, all collectively, decided to spend just 10 minutes of our ‘game’ time each day to:

  • Give someone a compliment
  • Help someone we know in need
  • Spend 10 minutes of quality time with loved ones
  • Educated ourselves on some of the needs happening in the world

Suddenly we could be using 300 million minutes to impact our world.  Spending our time doing things that have greater significance or influence which has a higher sense of value.  It puts more bounce in your step and day.

We choose each day who we want to be and what kind of world we want to create.

As a husband and wife team, we decided we wanted to bring a different perspective to the Apple app store and we created an app called Abundantly.

Our goal with Abundantly is simply to help people from all walks of life to remember to live life each day abundantly. Our dream is to use social media to mobilise people all over the world, and joining together we can make our world a better place.

Aside from helping users enrich their own lives, we wanted to help charities. 10% of all the app’s profits are donated to selected charities monthly.

2 responses so far

Twitter Widget for IBM Connections

Nov 02 2011

Today we are proud to release our latest widget for IBM Connections. This widget allows an IBM Connections user to associate their profile with their twitter feed and have the feed displayed when someone views their profile.

 

This widget uses a profile extension to allow the user to populate their twitter username using the edit profile functionality of IBM Connections.

For a limited time, Just Nudge is releasing this widget to the IBM Connections community free of charge.  To get the widget see our Twitter widget product page.  If you require any further information please contact us via email at [email protected].

 

 

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Checking out IBM Connections config files

Nov 02 2011

The IBM Connections wiki mentions checking out the configuration files to perform administrative changes to IBM Connections.  The method shown in the wiki is similar to the following:

LCConfigService.checkOutConfig("/temp", "foo01Cell01")

The cell name is often hard to remember and differs between environments.  To run the command without having to specify the cell name, run the command as follows:

LCConfigService.checkOutConfig("/temp", AdminControl.getCell())

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Updated Profile Progress Widget

Oct 24 2011

After much feedback from our customers we are proud to release the latest version of the IBM Connections Profile Progress widget.  The widget provides a user with graphical feedback on their profile’s maturity together with useful hints on how to improve their profile.

The new version of the widget includes easier customisation of the metrics and a reporting module that can give IBM Connections administrator’s an overview of their IBM Connections installation maturity.

For more details or to purchase the widget, please visit the widget product page or contact us at [email protected].

 

 

One response so far

IBM Connections Profile tag customization

Aug 02 2011

We have been creating a custom IBM Connection’s widget for a client that allows a user to upload a series of predefined tags to their (or someone else’s) profile. This in effect gives the user a catalogue of tags to choose from that are broken into sections, allowing them to rapidly populate their profile with tags that have meaning across the organisation. A couple of things came up as part of this development, firstly, what is the format of the ATOM message that is required?

To save you from using the help, what you need to do is upload the entire tags for the user, which means that if you want to add a single tag, you need to download the existing tags and add the additional tags to the list. The format of the ATOM file that needs to be sent is as follows (note this needs to be sent as a HTTP PUT):

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<categories xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2007/app" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:snx="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/ns">
<atom:category term="arabic"></atom:category>
<atom:category term="english"></atom:category>
<atom:category term="french"></atom:category>
<atom:category term="italian"></atom:category>
<atom:category term="mandarin"></atom:category>
<atom:category term="other language"></atom:category>
</categories>

This seems to work a treat in the testing that I have done so far. One interesting point to note is that this method of updating the tags allows you to insert tags into a profile that includes spaces – see the “other language” value above. This appears to work in the backend as well because it renders properly in the tags widget:

Profile Tags

If you would like to discuss customizing your IBM Connections implementing using widgets, then please email me at [email protected] for more information.

4 responses so far

IBM Connections Communities Widget Customization

Jun 21 2011

We are currently performing some work for a client and are creating some custom widgets for communities within IBM Connections. We successfully created the widgets but when you attempt to drop them onto the community they were only going into the second (or middle) column of the page.

However, when you attempt to add the “Media Gallery” widget it drops into third column (or the right column). After some investigation the way to ensure that your widget appears in the right column is to add primaryWidget=”false” to your widget definition as shown below:

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<widgetDef defId="My Great Widget"
           url="/myWidget/widget.xml"
           modes="view"
           primaryWidget="false" 
           iconUrl="/myWidget/logo.png" />

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WebSphere and SSL issues

Oct 14 2010

Two posts in one day, maybe I will become a blogger yet!

I have been using WebSphere Application Server for a reasonable amount of time (since version 3.5) and one of the things that is the most difficult to understand is the SSL configurations. Within WAS there are a number of different parts that use SSL:

  • Communication between the node agent and the deployment manager
  • Communication between the plugin and the application server
  • Inter-communication between the application servers

There are many more, depending on your configurations, but when they go bad they are a bit of a nightmare of solve. I tend to approach this issue in following way – Find out which component is not communicating properly – and understand that it is a communication, so by definition it will be at LEAST two way. When you find this, check the key and trust stores between them. The key store contains the key that the component will present and the trust store contains the certificates to allow that side to validate the others key. If the communication is within WebSphere (i.e. the examples mentioned above) then ensure that the copies of the keys and trust stores are the same as those on the deployment manager, if they are not simply copy them across (after backing up the configuration) and see if that fixes your problem.

If you are communicating outside of WebSphere, ensure that both sides trust stores contain the relevant certificates for the keys.

Lastly, if you are using a test environment, replace WebSphere’s default keys with ones that take longer to expire. It is surprising how many WebSphere installations hit this issue about one year after they are installed!

Good luck.

One response so far

Measuring collaboration with Lotus Connections

Oct 14 2010

Lotus Connections is billed as a tool to help an organisation collaborate more effectively, but what exactly does an organisation that collaborates more effectively look like and how does it differ from the organisation that we currently have? The answers to these questions can help make your social network more effective.

I believe the answer to the question is it depends. It depends on the type of organisation you are and the collaboration obstacles that your organisation has. Collaboration is relatively easy when your organisation has a single office, but as organisations become more complex they begin to experience collaboration difficulties.

For example, we have a client that has offices in every continent, with departments that span multiple geographies. With offshoring (or right shoring), this structure is becoming more common but it adds to the challenges of collaboration. In a worst scenario, each of these offices become “silos” of collaboration, where collaborative efforts connect an individual region but collaboration does not cross regions. Real collaboration tends to happen “across the desk” rather than across the ocean and as a consequence the teams can become largely separated, only joined by the management communications that flow down from above.

Lotus Connections is obviously a tool that can address this, by providing common spaces for communication, it allows your employees to communicate more freely with their peers in different regions, but how do you know that it is working?

The answer is to investigate the collaboration that is actually happening. How are the your employees collaborating? Are they collaborating across their boundaries or outside of their teams? The more that this happens the more effective the social network, but without actively measuring it the tool may only be reinforcing existing collaboration patterns.

Future posts will detail exactly how this type of collaboration can be measured, so stay tuned!

4 responses so far

Getting your users to populate their profile

Aug 19 2010

Lotus Connections is the market leading Enterprise 2.0 collaboration solution. It provides powerful collaborative tools that can transform organizations and empower users by making knowledge and information more accessible. The question is, how effective is your organization’s use of Lotus Connections?

One of the most powerful features of Lotus Connections is the profiles feature. The profiles allow users to find people outside of their immediate sphere with knowledge that they may be in need of. The benefits of this can be huge, by enabling users to reach out across teams you can:

  • Improve cross team communication
  • Leverage knowledge across geographies
  • Reduce the amount of re-learning within the organization

The primary source of this data is the profile itself that shows information about the person. By default, this is populated from sources such as LDAP and displays information that has existed in common intranet whitepages since the early days of the internet. This is useful, but not a huge step forward from what was there before. The real benefits come from getting the users to describe themselves because in many cases the organizational view of an individual will not describe their skills and expertise.

There are a number of different methods to help users populate their profile and I would like to go through them with you here.

1. Tell them what they need to do

Lotus Connections has a lot of options and places where information can be entered and it can be overwhelming for a new user who doesn’t know where to start. A simple graphical widget can give them an indication of their profile maturity and how it can be improved. To a certain point these can be thought of as collectable achievements and is a well known method in getting users more involved in systems.

JustNudge has produced a widget that provides this feedback to the user, giving them both a graphical representation of their progress together with information on a potential next step.

Profile Progress Widget

The feedback can be relatively dynamic, it should suggest many potential options to the user:

Profile Progress Widget

This method has the following advantages:

  • You give the user a clear path to completing their profile.
  • There is an incentive for completing the profile – it may sound trival but how many of us have completed our profile on LinkedIn based on a similar concept?

2. Making profile population easier

By default the entry fields for Lotus Connections are text boxes. This has the advantage in that it allows great flexibility in the entry of data but is not so good when the user should be selecting an option from a list. It is possible to change the connections entry fields in Lotus Connections 2.5 as shown below:

Profile Modifications

By provide a select box for data entry you can:

  • Capture information simply and accurately.
  • Use the information captured to possibly populate other fields

Conclusion

The profiles feature in Lotus Connections is one of the most important parts of Lotus Connections and can be customized to ensure that user’s populate it correctly. JustNudge Software has a pre-built profile progress widget that can give feedback to the user and we also provide services for profile customization. If you require more information then contact us for more information.

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The real life social network

Jul 16 2010

I came across a presentation by Paul Adams from Google, which is embedded at the end of this post. Some things in this post struck me, while obvious I never considered them before. For example his statement:

The social web is not a fad, and it’s not going away.  It’s not an add on to the web as we know it today.  It’s a fundamental change, a re-architecture and in hindsight its evolution was obvious.

When I read this I though, yup all that is true.  While things like facebook, twitter and foursquare may be very different in 5 years (or maybe not even around), the reality is that the services that they provide will still be there.  The question that comes from this is what does it mean for all our applications.  Do these applications need to be changed to make them social, is this always appropriate?

I was in a meeting about Service Management tools the other day and talking to a vendor about their offering and someone mentioned that the knowledge base that they had was a little out of date, but they didn’t have access to change it.  I wondered whether socialising the data in there and letting user’s share their experiences and workarounds – rather than getting a help desk to read this information – would be a much more appropriate solution (something like a stackoverflow.com type of service.  Thinking about this application, it is pretty much as bread and butter as you can get.

This quote is also thought provoking:

The social web and all social media that operates within it, is a way of thinking as opposed to a new channel. It’s not about sales, or click through rates. It’s about pursuing relationships and fostering communities of customers. It’s about rethinking how you make plans when your customers are in the center and in control.

This is a deep change indeed. Organisations that can better connect with their customers will certainly get better repeat business from their customers. The fact that the online world is catching up with our offline relationships indicates a dramatic shift in what the online world will become and thinking that where we are now is the end of the journey is probably much the same as Gutenberg thinking that the book was finished when he produced his Bible.

We certainly do live in interesting times.

One response so far