Collaborative Thinking

Gnip Continues To Push For A Real-Time (Data) Web

2009-07-13T07:32:30-04:00

Another company to watch:

New Gnip Push API Service

The Gnip product offerings are growing today as we officially announce a new Push API Service that will help companies more quickly and effectively deliver data to their customers, partners and affiliates. (See the TechCrunch article: Gnip Launches Push API To Create Real-Time Stream Of Business Data )

This new offering leverages the Gnip SaaS Integration Platform but is provided as a complete white-label and embeddable solution adding real-time push to an existing infrastructure. The main capabilities include the following:

Push Endpoint Management: Easily register service endpoints and APIs to create alternative Push endpoints that are powered by the Gnip platform.
Real-time Data Delivery: Complete white-label approach allows for company defined URLs to be enhanced for real-time data delivery. Reduce your data latency and infrastructure costs while maintaining control of data access and offloading the delivery to Gnip
Reporting Dashboard: Access important metrics and usage information for service endpoints through a statistics API or a web-based dashboard

Gnip - Delivering the Web's Data » real-time

Gnip Now Offers Smarter Activity Feeds With PostRank
Full feeds of data are exciting, but sometimes you need a little something special.
Gnip, the Boulder, Colorado startup aiming to act as a clearinghouse for user activity updates from around the web, announced a partnership today with Canadian firm PostRank, to offer additional versions of Gnip-delivered data feeds, filtered by popularity. Gnip could already deliver anyone a big bucket of user data like photos from Flickr, submissions from Digg or slide shows from SlideShare - but now this partnership will allow customers the option of receiving only those items that were most commented on, linked-to, tweeted about, etc. It's wonky, but it's a whole lot of fun.
Popularity isn't a perfect substitute for quality, but it's not a bad place to start looking. Especially when inbound feeds are being displayed on a 3rd party's website automatically, the ability to crank up or down popularity criteria for inclusion in a feed can be really useful.

Gnip Now Offers Smarter Activity Feeds With PostRank

Gnip Launches Push API To Create Real-Time Stream Of Business Data

The Web is speeding up and Gnip wants to help push it along. Today, the API aggregation platform is releasing its own Push API which lets any site patch together its own version of Friendfeed or Twitter-like data stream. Gnip will be speaking at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp tomorrow on the Real-Time Business panel.

Gnip lets data-consuming services like Plaxo that take data from other services (like Twitter, Facebook Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, etc.) collect data from requested users pushed to them. Data consumers using Gnip’s platform can get public data streams for over 30 social media networks and sites, including Twitter, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, Six Apart and others without ever visiting those sites or accessing their individual APIs.
The new push service lets companies filter and white-label the stream so the technology is fully integrated into the business’ infrastructure. Companies list out the most common data requests that are made on their APIs and websites and Gnip will collect the relevant data and deliver it in real-time to any approved third-party. For example, a travel website like Expedia or Kayak may use Gnip’s service to track and deliver real-time information on how customers are interacting with airline deals to the vendors that are listing flights on their site, like American Airlines or Delta. The real-time capabilities would let a travel site analyze real-time data and syndicate changes in fare sales immediately.

Gnip Launches Push API To Create Real-Time Stream Of Business Data

Opening Up And Speeding Up Feeds

2009-07-13T07:21:05-04:00

Google announced an open-source effort to improve the real-time notification capabilities of feed syndication:

Real-Time Product Launch Recap - Digital Life Blog - InformationWeek

Pubsubhubbub - This one comes from Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and is very technical but the basic idea is any RSS feed using FeedBurner will now be updated nearly instantly whereas previously there was a delay in feed updating. It's built on the "pubsub" protocol and a variety of open-source clients have been created to allow applications that need feed data to receive it in a near real-time capacity. Google has created a wiki to discuss the Pubsubhubbub release.

Real-Time Product Launch Recap - Digital Life Blog - InformationWeek

Here’s the video from PubSubHub’s demo at the Real-Time event:

Speeding Up RSS

pubsubhubbub - Google Code
A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom.
Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks) when a topic (Atom URL) they're interested in is updated.
The protocol in a nutshell is as follows:

An Atom URL (a "topic") declares its Hub server(s) in its Atom XML file, via <link rel="hub" ...>. The hub(s) can be run by the publisher of the Atom, or can be a community hub that anybody can use. (RssFeeds are also supported!)

A subscriber (a server that's interested in a topic), initially fetches the Atom URL as normal. If the Atom file declares its hubs, the subscriber can then avoid lame, repeated polling of the URL and can instead register with the feed's hub(s) and subscribe to updates.

The subscriber subscribes to the Topic URL from the Topic URL's declared Hub(s).

When the Publisher next updates the Topic URL, the publisher software pings the Hub(s) saying that there's an update.

The hub efficiently fetches the published feed and multicasts the new/changed content out to all registered subscribers.

The protocol is decentralized and free. No company is at the center of this controlling it. Anybody can run a hub, or anybody can ping (publish) or subscribe using open hubs.
To bootstrap this, we've provided an open source reference implementation of the hub (the hard part of the protocol) that runs on Google App Engine, and is open for anybody to use.

pubsubhubbub - Google Code

Community Equity, SunSpace, FOAF+SSL, & KiWi

2009-07-12T19:02:23-04:00

If you are following open source developments related to social networks, communities, and/or the semantic web, these three efforts (Community Equity, FOAF+SSL, and Kiwi) should be of interest:

CommunityEquity

Community Equity Open Source Milestone 1.1 released http://digg.com/u17asN
6:10 PM Jul 8th from twhirl

Community Equity (CommunityEquity) on Twitter

SunSpace Use Case
The second half of Friday was dedicated to discussing the Sun Use Case, and the technologies and services we would need to integrate there to support the already existing SunSpace intranet. We agreed that it was unreasonable and unrealistic to expect that Sun would replace the existing Confluence installation in favor of KiWi, because the aim of KiWi cannot be to create yet another Wiki engine that competes with what is already there. Instead, in the SunSpace use case, the KiWi system will be more like an intelligent index that integrates content and data from already existing sources and offers additional value in the form of advanced services (e.g. search, tagging, …) and widgets that can be included on the user interface level (e.g. recommendations, tagging, metadata, …). The data integration will make use of existing technologies like Linked (Open) Data. We decided that we would contribute particularly to the update mechanism of Linked Data since this seems to be an issue that is yet not resolved.
A second major point of discussion was the integration of Sun’s Community Equity (CE) with KiWi. We decided that we would head for a rather tight integration at the EJB level rather than at the Web Service level, because then we will be able to use CE more easily for e.g. recommendation and search. This integration will take place until end of August.
Finally, we briefly discussed single sign on for KiWi and correspondingly, Henry’s suggestion for FOAF+SSL, which Steffi has already mostly implemented in KiWi. Also, an issue still to be solved for the SunSpace Use Case is how to handle permission management in KiWi.
We closed the meeting on Friday afternoon. Most said it was the most productive KiWi meeting we had yet and that we have moved much forward. I just hope that we can also hold the pace.:-)
Note: I will upload figures and pictures as soon as I have them.

Sebastian Schaffert » KiWi July Meeting in Prague: Towards Integration

FOAF+SSL

FOAF+SSL is a authentication and authorization protocol that links a Web ID to a public key, thereby enabling a global, decentralized/distributed, and open yet secure social network. It functions with existing browsers.
It uses PKI standards — usually thought of as hierarchical trust management tools — in a decentralized "web of trust" way. The web of trust is built using semantic web vocabularies (particularly FOAF) published in RESTful manner to form Linked Data.
Based on well known and widely deployed standards, FOAF+SSL and its implications is being discussed on the FOAF protocols mailing list. Other implementations of this conceptual protocol will probably retain SSL in the mix, but FOAF may be replaced by any of several other vocabularies.
For the most recent description of the protocol, read the one-page FOAF+SSL: Adding Security to Open Distributed Social Networks. If you feel there is something odd going on, your suspicion will be confirmed on reading The FOAF+SSL Paradigm Shift, which should also help you align your intuitions better. For a much more detailed, technical explanation of the way we are thinking of trust, see FOAF+SSL: Creating a Web of Trust without Key Signing Parties.

foaf+ssl - ESW Wiki

KiWi - Knowledge In A Wiki - About
KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki is an EU-funded project (No 211932) combining the wiki philosophy with methods of the Semantic Web, aiming to develop a new approach to knowledge management.
The main outcomes of the project will be

an enhanced wiki vision (the "KiWi vision") describing how the "convention over configuration" paradigm of wikis combined with semantic technologies can lead to flexible and problem-oriented knowledgemanagement,
a collaborative, web-based environment (the "KiWi system") that provides support for knowledge sharing, knowledge creation, and coordination in software and project knowledge management,
the evaluation of this system in two concrete, representative use cases at our industry partners,
the "KIWI handbook", describing the project vision, the KiWi system functionalities, as well as giving recommendations and best practices for using the system in concrete knowledge management scenarios.

The KIWI consortium brings together leading research groups (Salzburg Research, Aalborg University, Brno University of Technology, LMU Munich) in the areas of semantic wikis, reasoning, information extraction, personalisation, and knowledge management for software processes. These are matched by two large international corporations in knowledge intensive areas (Sun Microsystems and Logica) that offer use cases demonstrating a clear need for the advanced knowledge management we envision in the project, and by a SME (Semantic Web Company) specialised in the dissemination of semantic technologies to the industry.
Detailed information about the consortium is available in the Partners section.

KiWi - Knowledge In A Wiki - About

Compliance Doesn't Sell E2.0 ... But It Should

2009-07-10T07:33:37-04:00

I was interviewed by Alexander for this article while attending the E2.0 event in Boston. Compliance-related features are lagging (which is normal) but some of the gaps are showstoppers for some organizations and need to become a higher priority by vendors selling social platforms - one option is to partner with vendors already delivering compliance and security-related tools for more traditional collaboration, communication, and content management systems.

Compliance concerns dog enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms

Can an enterprise leverage collaborative software like blogs, wikis and microblogging platforms and retain compliance? It can, if collaboration platforms are built in-house from selected technologies, as opposed to an all-in-one suite from an Enterprise 2.0 (E20) vendor. Enterprise 2.0 compliance, in other words, is something best baked in from day one.

What lies beneath that reality? Mike Gotta, a senior analyst at Burton Group Inc., believes that "compliance isn't a first-order design point for more enterprise 2.0 vendors," he said at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2009 in Boston. "How many vendors have permission models around their activity streams?"
Such controls are crucial under the European Union's privacy laws -- or perhaps under a proposed national data privacy law here in the U.S. Sameer Patel, an Enterprise 2.0 execution and social software consultant, shared that assessment. When asked if E20 vendors "get" compliance, he responded, "Nope, not yet. It may be overkill, but spending 10 minutes with enterprise content management vendors or the IBM collaboration group exposed how little E20 has attended to this."

Compliance concerns dog enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms

Feeling the Heat: The Effects of Performance Pressure on Teams' Knowledge Use and Performance

2009-07-10T07:33:09-04:00

Worth reading (especially if you have a techno-centric view of collaboration) - additional information and download information on the HBS Working Knowledge site:

Executive Summary:

Why do teams often fail to use their knowledge resources effectively even after they have correctly identified the experts among them? Project teams are a prominent feature of the knowledge-based economy, and member expertise has long been recognized as an important resource that can greatly affect team performance, but only to the extent that it is accurately recognized and used to accomplish the objective. The step between recognizing others' expertise and then actually applying it to achieve a collective outcome, however, is highly problematic: Even when individuals know who holds relevant task expertise, they are often unwilling or unable to give the experts appropriate influence over the group process and outcomes. HBS professor Heidi K. Gardner takes a multidisciplinary approach to develop theory explaining how interpersonal dynamics in teams affect members' use of each other's distinct knowledge, ultimately leading to differential performance outcomes. Key concepts include:

Teams facing significant performance pressures tend to default to high-status members at the expense of using team members with deep knowledge of the client, with detrimental effects on team performance.
The more important the project, the less effective the team: Excessive performance pressure results in the team reverting to less effective ways of divvying up influence over its end product, in turn leading to lower performance ratings for the whole team.
Team process is important in enabling organizations to harness knowledge resources for the benefit of maintaining strong relations with their clients.

Feeling the Heat: The Effects of Performance Pressure on Teams' Knowledge Use and Performance — HBS Working Knowledge

Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Real Stories From Real People

2009-07-09T06:26:47-04:00

Given the economy, and restrictions on travel in many organizations, the Enterprise 2.0 conference still managed to present many stories from "real people" doing "real stuff" under the banner of "Enterprise 2.0". I did a quick pass through "by day" view and thought it would be nice to call out these individuals (as well as their respective organizations) and thank them for taking the time to come to Boston and share their experiences. If I missed anyone, or mis-categorized someone, my apologies (correct me via comments). With so many post-event commentary talking about the over-abundance of vendor and industry expert presentors, perhaps they failed to notice the sessions involving these speakers. Could the conference had more end-user case studies? Sure - of course. That's an easy critique to make. Help us (disclaimer: I am on the board of advisors for the conference) by having end-user organizations submit proposals. It's not as easy as it sounds.

So again - thanks to the individuals (and organizations) below who stood up in front of people and told a story. Sharing hands-on experience helps others trying to move their own organization forward. Thanks also to those that also participated in the "unconference" sessions. Without "real stories" from "real people" - there would not be a conference!

By person:

Ben Foster, Strategy and Content Manager, Allstate Life Insurance
Bert Sandie, Director, Technical Excellence, Electronic Arts, Inc.
Christopher Keohane, Social Media Program Product Manager, Lockheed Martin IS&GS - CIO - Architecture Services
Dan McCall, Project Manager, Genentech
Erik Johnson, General Manager, cubeless, Sabre Holdings
Greg Matthews, Director, Consumer Innovations, Humana
Karen Klinzing, Assistant Commissioner of Education for Minnesota and a former state representative
Kishan Mallur, Director, Information Technology, Infrastructure Services, Harvard University
Michael Rudnick, Global Practice Leader, Intranets, Portals & Collaboration, Watson Wyatt
Morgan Johnston, Manager Corporate Communications, JetBlue Airways
Nate Nash, Senior Manager, BearingPoint
Patricia Romeo, Talent Innovation, Deloitte
Richard Collin, Professor, Grenoble Management School, Director Enterprise 2.0 Institute, Chair Collective Efficiency, Grenoble Management School
Shawn Dahlen, Social Media Program Manager, Lockheed Martin IS&GS CIO Office
Ted Hopton, Wiki Community Manager, UBM
Tom Monroe, KM Project Manager, Battelle
Vincent Carlisle, Forums Director at the Battle Command Knowledge System, U.S. Army
Virginia Adamson, Senior Business Consultant, Content & Collaboration Services, Volvo Information Technology
Walton Smith, Senior Associate, Booz Allen Hamilton

By Firm

Allstate Life Insurance
Battelle
BearingPoint
Booz Allen Hamilton
Deloitte
Electronic Arts, Inc.
Genentech
Grenoble Management School
Harvard University
Humana
JetBlue Airways
Lockheed Martin IS&GS
Sabre Holdings
State of Minnesota
UBM
U.S. Army
Volvo
Watson Wyatt

Avoiding "Change Addiction"

2009-07-08T19:54:27-04:00

Given the post-Enterprise 2.0 conference prognostications regarding the "death" of E2.0 - an article worth reading below. Perhaps another potential keynote speaker for a future E2.0 event (earlier, I thought Mark Pesce might also be a good candidate).

BP's Fiona MacLeod: A Change Agent Sees Change 'Addiction' - Knowledge@Wharton

After 20 years of experience leading change management programs in the U.S., Europe and New Zealand, BP executive Fiona MacLeod has concluded that the corporate world is "addicted" to serial change management programs that consume massive resources but ultimately fail to solve the problems they aim to address. "What really struck me is why so many of these change management programs fail," only to be followed by similar initiatives within one or two years, often before the original program is completed, said MacLeod, president of BP Convenience Retail USA & Latin America.

At the recent Wharton Leadership Conference, co-sponsored by the Center for Human Resources and the Center for Leadership & Change Management, MacLeod urged her fellow leaders to ask themselves: "How can we ... free ourselves from our addiction to episodic change and move to a much more healthy habit of continuous business improvement?" She compared the phenomenon to a yo-yo dieter who loses weight only to put it back on because he has not come to understand what's causing his weight gain, or has failed to adopt the healthy lifestyle that would keep the weight off.

... MacLeod urged managers to attend to "the soft side of change" by putting in place programs to fully engage leaders and employees in the process of creating change and sustaining it over time. "As business leaders, we're very good at the rational part" of change: Identifying what's wrong and how to fix it. But the soft side of change management -- in terms of really engaging people -- is just as important. If people get it intellectually but don't get it emotionally, I don't believe the change will be sustained."

... Business leaders must own the change agenda and take responsibility for following through on implementing every step in the plan and tracking results to make sure that change continues over time. "Never assume that leaders get it.... We need to take probably 10 times as long in engaging, empowering and educating our leaders than we actually think we do," MacLeod said.
... It's important also to shift the emphasis of change management from "big splashes" to "everyday performance improvement." You can prevent the typical reversion to old habits by providing tools and training required to continually measure progress toward specific change objectives. "Put written charters and contracts in place. These contracts need to be in people's performance reviews, not something separate," MacLeod said. "You need to constantly look at them and discuss them with people."
... Changing the culture to reward the desired behavior is critical to success. Make "heroes of our day-to-day deliverers, not those who make the biggest splash. You reward people on how they treat the customer, how they make decisions, how they simplify the business..... And crucially, all of this has to be done in the spirit of open communication and respect.... If [people are] uncertain and they don't feel respected, the change will never stick," MacLeod said.
... Organizational design helped to lay the foundation for change. "I put my winning, end-state organization in place from day one" rather than waiting to decide which employees would stay to support the franchises and which would leave," MacLeod stated. "We had people who knew they would be leaving in 18 months and they stayed motivated for the entire period because we had been very straight with them. People want and expect clarity from their leaders." Planning was critical to reduce risk as the team rolled out new concepts. "We did lots of road mapping and tested our plans before we went to market," MacLeod said.
... She noted that "it's very easy to get addicted to the change pattern by not getting the change right in the first place, not making the tough calls or bold decisions up-front, maybe going for something half-way, and then allowing things to slip back."

BP's Fiona MacLeod: A Change Agent Sees Change 'Addiction' - Knowledge@Wharton

Social Graph Engines

2009-07-03T16:26:31-04:00

Very likely to be one of the next "big battles" for those trying to scale social networking and related tools/applications. Anyone have other candidates to keep track of? The one's below might be the start of a watch-list of sorts:

Large-scale graph computing at Google

In order to achieve that, we have created scalable infrastructure, named Pregel, to mine a wide range of graphs. In Pregel, programs are expressed as a sequence of iterations. In each iteration, a vertex can, independently of other vertices, receive messages sent to it in the previous iteration, send messages to other vertices, modify its own and its outgoing edges' states, and mutate the graph's topology (experts in parallel processing will recognize that the Bulk Synchronous Parallel Model inspired Pregel).
Currently, Pregel scales to billions of vertices and edges, but this limit will keep expanding. Pregel's applicability is harder to quantify, but so far we haven't come across a type of graph or a practical graph computing problem which is not solvable with Pregel. It computes over large graphs much faster than alternatives, and the application programming interface is easy to use. Implementing PageRank, for example, takes only about 15 lines of code. Developers of dozens of Pregel applications within Google have found that "thinking like a vertex," which is the essence of programming in Pregel, is intuitive.

We've been using Pregel internally for a while now, but we are beginning to share information about it outside of Google. Greg Malewicz will be speaking at the joint industrial track between ACM PODC and ACM SPAA this August on the very subject. In case you aren't able to join us there, here's a spoiler: The seven bridges of Königsberg — inspiration for Leonhard Euler's famous theorem that established the basics of graph theory — spanned the Pregel river.

Official Google Research Blog: Large-scale graph computing at Google

Neo4j - a Graph Database that Kicks Buttox | High Scalability

A graph is a collection nodes (things) and edges (relationships) that connect pairs of nodes. Slap properties (key-value pairs) on nodes and relationships and you have a surprisingly powerful way to represent most anything you can think of. In a graph database "relationships are first-class citizens. They connect two nodes and both nodes and relationships can hold an arbitrary amount of key-value pairs. So you can look at a graph database as a key-value store, with full support for relationships."

A graph looks something like:

For more lovely examples take a look at the Graph Image Gallery.

Here's a good summary by Emil Eifrem, founder of the Neo4j, making the case for why graph databases rule:

Most applications today handle data that is deeply associative, i.e. structured as graphs (networks). The most obvious example of this is social networking sites, but even tagging systems, content management systems and wikis deal with inherently hierarchical or graph-shaped data.

This turns out to be a problem because it’s difficult to deal with recursive data structures in traditional relational databases. In essence, each traversal along a link in a graph is a join, and joins are known to be very expensive. Furthermore, with user-driven content, it is difficult to pre-conceive the exact schema of the data that will be handled. Unfortunately, the relational model requires upfront schemas and makes it difficult to fit this more dynamic and ad-hoc data.

A graph database uses nodes, relationships between nodes and key-value properties instead of tables to represent information. This model is typically substantially faster for associative data sets and uses a schema-less, bottoms-up model that is ideal for capturing ad-hoc and rapidly changing data.

Neo4j - a Graph Database that Kicks Buttox | High Scalability

HeartProposal – Heart Project

Abstract¶

Heart (Highly Extensible & Accumulative RDF Table) will develop a planet-scale RDF data store and a distributed processing engine based on Hadoop & Hbase.

Proposal¶

Heart will develop a Hadoop subsystem for RDF data store and a distributed processing engine which use Hbase + MapReduce to store and to process RDF data.

Background¶

We can store very sparse RDF data in a single table in Hbase, with as many columns as they need. For example, we might make a row for each RDF subject in a table and store all the properties and their values as columns in the table. This reduces costly self-joins in answering queries asking questions on the same subject, which results in efficient processing of queries, although we still need self-joins to answer RDF path queries.

We can further accelerate query performance by using MapReduce for parallel, distributed query processing.

HeartProposal – Heart Project

Apache Shindig 1.0-incubating released

2009-07-02T19:21:27-04:00

I would love to see a credible/viable open source option emerge that can support a distributed and/or federated model for social network sites. Still hopeful that Apache SocialSite Project Incubation Status can gain traction.

Apache Shindig 1.0-incubating released

Thursday, July 02, 2009 at 10:58:00 AM

Apache Shindig aims to make it simple to create your own OpenSocial container by providing an open source implementation (in both Java and PHP) of the OpenSocial APIs. The Shindig team recently made creating and maintaining an OpenSocial container even easier, by publishing a release that supports OpenSocial v0.8.1.

OpenSocial API Blog: Apache Shindig 1.0-incubating released

Additional background info:

Apache Shindig Components

Server Side

The Java and PHP version of Apache Shindig have 3 major server side components:

Persistent Data Loading Mechanism;
Gadget Rendering Infrastructure;
OpenSocial server side implementation.

Components of Apache Shindig Java Server Side container

Components of Apache Shindig PHP Server Side container
Client Side

The Javascript features are:

Gadget container (gadget.js), fully opensocial gadget compliant;
OpenSocial container;
JSON, Restful container and Caja support.

Shindig - Overview Of Apache Shindig

Communicate The Mission In Turbulent Times

2009-06-30T11:36:41-04:00

What I like about this article (well-worth reading the full story on the Wharton site) - is the focus on communication, people, and (perhaps implied) constructing a sense of community around the mission. In some organizations that I talked to as part of the social networking field research study, a resurgence in communication and employee engagement works well when it is not "at" workers but "with" workers. Enabling participatory cultures within organizations augments communication and employee engagement efforts - more effective and sustainable for both employee and employer. What do I mean by “participatory culture”? I am building off the work of Henry Jenkins, Director MIT Comparative Media Studies Program:

“A participatory culture has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby the most experienced members pass along knowledge to novices. A participatory culture also is one where members believe their contributions matter and feel some degree of social connection with one another. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement.”
Threshold, Spring 2009, http://www.ciconline.org/threshold

Thinking-out-loud, I believe this line-of-thought is applicable within the enterprise and enhances what people describe as Enterprise 2.0 - if you stretch is just a bit to not only focus on literacy but also include relationships and the systems of meaning that evolve through creative expression and community involvement. If we agree on that, then we can think of participatory cultures as it applies to certain aspects of what DuPoint CEO Ellen Kullman points out in two of her principles related to communication and mission (reading in-between the lines on my part):

DuPont CEO Ellen Kullman's Four Principles for Moving Ahead during Turbulent Times - Knowledge@Whart

..... Speaking at the recent 13^th Annual Wharton Leadership Conference, co-sponsored by the Center for Human Resources and the Center for Leadership & Change Management, Kullman described how she changed the company's thinking about its business model, while reinforcing its 200-year-old culture of innovation. "The question is, given the megatrends in the world and given the new economy, what changes do we have to make to continue to be successful?
..... Kullman identified three trends that would transcend the current crisis and provide a strategic framework for the company's annual $1.4 billion investment in research and development -- increasing agricultural productivity, reducing dependence on fossil fuels and protecting lives.
..... But organizing the company to respond to these long-term trends during a period of extreme uncertainty required strong leadership and specific initiatives "to change the way we think," said Kullman, who joined DuPont in 1988 as a marketing manager for medical imaging, and was named executive vice president and a member of the office of chief executive in 2006, and president in October 2008. Prior to joining DuPont, Kullman, who has a B.S. in engineering from Tufts and a master's in management from Northwestern, worked at GE. She shared four leadership principles that she has implemented to guide DuPont through the financial crisis since October 2008.

..... The first principle: Focus on what you can control. Kullman realized she needed to shift the company's attention from what was going wrong to the immediate action required to protect DuPont's financial position as revenues fell dramatically. "Last October, I saw a lot of people who looked scared and didn't know what to do," she said. So, she directed DuPont's management to "figure out those ... things we can do something about, and get about doing them."
..... The second of her leadership principles for the crisis has been to "adopt a new trajectory by rethinking your business model." For DuPont, that meant "getting people to think differently" about a business model that had always measured success based on plant capacity and capital investment: "We invent, we build, we make, we sell," Kullman said.
..... Kullman's third crisis leadership principle: Communication is key. "I'm a firm believer that there is a direct correlation between growth and the success of our communication. When we have an aligned team that understands" very clearly what the goals and the tradeoffs are, "that's when things can absolutely happen," Kullman said.
..... The last of her four crisis leadership principles is to maintain pride around the company's mission. "There's nothing like a bad economy to get people confused about what their mission is. They start thinking their mission is to reduce cost. That's a tactic, that's not our mission,' Kullman said.

..... During informal weekly meetings with employees, Kullman said she was amazed that the "number one question was about whether we are going to stick with our mission." She quickly realized that "people are scared [and] people want direction." Making sure that people understand the mission -- and linking their daily activities to the company's broader purpose -- is essential to reducing fear, maintaining morale and keeping employees motivated, Kullman said.
DuPont CEO Ellen Kullman's Four Principles for Moving Ahead during Turbulent Times - Knowledge@Whart